Its lucky that the job market is infinitely flexible and everyone can pick and choose exactly what job they do, when they do it and how much they get paid for it.
Your sarcasm would be funny if it weren't so one-sided. Here are both sides of the matter:
People can't choose exactly what job they do and how much they get paid for it. (If they could, they would choose infinite compensation for doing nothing.)
Conversely, employers can't choose exactly who they want to hire and how much they want to pay in wages. (If they could, the would hire only the most qualified people in the world, and pay them nothing.)
The free market is the mechanism that finds the best compromise between these two extremes; it forges labor-for-money transactions that both parties perceive as being in their own best interests. If either employees or employers are coerced to alter their behavior, it's no longer a free market, and the transaction may no longer be in the best interest of one or both of the parties.
For example: Mary, a 67-yr-old woman on a fixed income, is willing to pay the neighbor kid $5 per hour to mow her lawn, and the neighbor kid is eager to put down his X-box controller and do it. But then Mary becomes aware that this would violate minimum wage laws, and decides not to proceed. Both parties have been precluded from a transaction that would have been in their own best interests.
Their big problem is the energy source. Internal combustion engines are just so 20th century.
Actually, they would have a big problem -- namely, abysmal energy density -- if they switched from internal combustion to batteries. The technology that best meets the mission requirements is the technology that should be used. Let's not have prejudices against the best-performing technology, simply because it also performed well in the 20th century.
there will not be enough Bitcoins to cover the increased commerce
Sure there will, unless somebody tries to impose price controls that prevent Bitcoins from gaining value (i.e., that prevent deflation from happening). Deflation is the natural and proper response when the supply of a particular currency doesn't grow enough to meet the demand for that particular currency.
And if some entrepreneur introduces yet another currency, whose supply is more responsive to demand, that too is a natural and proper response.
Is the difficulty of minting new Bitcoins set in stone? Maybe it could be relaxed a bit, to try to prevent deflation.
Slightly off-topic: the goal of the Federal Reserve -- the target of its policies -- is for the U.S. dollar to experience inflation of 2% per year. Not 4%, not 0%, but 2%. Can anyone explain why? I've always thought a target of 0% would make more sense. The 2% target means that sellers have to expend effort to reprice their goods and services more often -- for no other reason than the existence of that 2% target. And that's not a productive activity. (And then there's old-timers who kvetch about the dollar not buying as much as it used to, and see inflation as a symptom of decay. They would have less to complain about, and have improved confidence in the economy, and feel like they were passing a more stable world on to their grandkids, if the Fed had a 0% target.)
If you anticipate inflation, it's in your interest to trade your currency for something that's less likely to lose value. Hyperinflation meets my definition of "collapse" of a currency.
If you anticipate deflation, it's in your interest to convert goods into currency that's likely to gain value (i.e., to hoard currency). A currency that's gaining value can hardly be said to have collapsed.
Deflation happens when the supply of a particular currency doesn't grow fast enough to meet the demand for that currency.
No disrespect, but how did your post get +5 Insightful?
Actually, researchers who use genetic algorithms to solve problems are extremely intelligent. "A genetic algorithm is a search heuristic that mimics the process of natural selection."
Natural selection itself, then, is the ultimate genetic algorithm, and the entity that created the process of natural selection is the ultimate intelligence.
Go back to my original post: I was working for the federal government, and they were sending out annual emails asking for suggestions on how to spend the "underspend." Things weren't working there. That's dysfunctional.
I'm interested as to how your department is able to underspend four years in a row. Did they get any change to their budget after underspending the first year
My unit got annual increases, because by the end of the year, they managed to spend what had been shaping up to be an underspend. All the underspends were, frankly, wasted on crap we didn't need. That too is dysfunctional.
Speaking of Walmart, I can use it to make an example of what I'm talking about. The person controlling a store's finances should be rewarded when expenses are reduced. One way to do that is to find brands of janitorial supplies that work nearly as well as top-of-the-line brands, at half the cost. (Walmart's own "Great Value" store brand might fit the bill.) But if costs are cut to an unreasonable degree, the floors will be filthy. So the store should be judged on cleanliness, as well as expense levels. If done right, this will drive store management to find the sweet spot in the trade-off between low expenses and spotless floors.
Corporatists support corporations in general, without picking favorites. You got close by saying this is more cronyism than corporatism. To hit the nail on the head: this is ALL cronyism.
The companies who hold the large-battery patents are only shooting themselves in the foot if their asking price to license their intellectual property is so high that it stifles adoption.
Generally, owners of intellectual property do not shoot themselves in the foot. They prefer the large revenue stream that accompanies widespread adoption of their IP.
You still don't seem to see my point, which is, it shouldn't be too difficult to set up a regulatory environment that rewards departments that don't spend their entire budget, and at the same time, punishes departments that use fraudulent means to try to obtain that reward. ("Fraudulent means" would include curtailing spending that is necessary to accomplish the mission.)
Why should my situation be considered an "unusual"? It happened four out of four years that I was employed there. When departments know that next year's budget will be cut if they don't go out of their way to spend 100% of this year's budget, wasteful spending is the usual and predictable result.
Our unit had already spent all the money it needed to, for those fiscal years, to accomplish its mission. Only then did our financial controller send emails asking for suggestions on how to spend the "underspend."
Cutting corners on accomplishing the mission is certainly not something that should be rewarded, and that's obviously not what I was talking about, unless you assume malicious intent on my part.
By the way, we ended up with "underspends" despite the fact that we weren't trying particularly hard to economize. We should have been. That wasn't our money we were spending; it was money withheld from the paychecks of people who earned it.
Last financial year, we had an underspend at work, and it was suggested...
Let me guess: this person works for the federal government.
Bureaucratic idiocies are real. When I worked for the federal government, our unit's financial controller sent out an annual email soliciting ideas for how to spend the underspend.
"Sent it back to Washington, so the Treasury can borrow marginally less money from China et.al." was never an option, because doing so would cause the unit's budget in the next fiscal year to be cut.
A better strategy, that might actually result in sub-trillion-dollar deficits, would be to reward government entities that don't spend their entire budget. Tell the financial controllers to send 99% of the "underspend" back to Washington, and personally pocket the other 1%. Suddenly you will see massive underspends appearing all over the place!
Yes, modeling the effect of speed limits on the economy would be a terribly complex problem. But probably not as complex as modeling global climate, and lots of people are enthusiastically tackling that problem. Any sort of reasonably-informed model would be better than what we have now: speed limits that are chosen somewhat arbitrarily, if not on "gut feelings."
there is no logical reason for a machine driven car to have a lower fatality rate than a human driven car.
The opposite can also be asserted, with at least as much validity: there's no logical reason why a driving algorithm, which is a very different animal than a human driver, should be equally unsafe as a human driver.
You know how a barber sometimes nicks your ears with his clippers or scissors? Suppose a robot barber is invented, and its astute sensors and precision control make nicks a thing of the past. Would ColdSam be out there saying, "speed the thing up until it nicks my ears just as often as my old barber did! Any other course of action would be illogical."
Reducing fatalities has an economic cost, and a logical, non-emotional society would specify exactly how much cost is acceptable to reduce fatalities. You have to draw the line somewhere (for example: "proposed guardrail installation is projected to prevent one fatality during its service life. We will proceed with installation if a contractor bid comes in under $9.8 million, but not if all bids are over $9.8 million.")
You need to apply a similar logic-based analysis at all points along a driving algorithm's speed/safety curve: "Regarding Google Driving Algorithm 4.2.3: reducing its speed limit from 137.338 mph to 137.311 mph is projected to prevent one fatality. We will proceed with this reduction only if it will shrink GDP by less than $9.8 million." Keep iterating until the marginal cost of a speed limit reduction is more than than the marginal benefit, and then stop, because right there you've found your optimal speed limit. (This is an oversimplification, of course, because there is no single speed limit applicable at all points on all roads.)
And guess what: when you use this logical process to find the optimal speed limit for Google Driving Algorithm 4.2.3, the fatality rate is not going to be the same as it was for human drivers. It's likely to be significantly lower than the fatality rate that was tolerated when humans were behind the wheel.
Kind of how like new drugs are very expensive at first, then cheap generics come out when the patent expires.
I wouldn't have it any other way. The profits made possible by patent protection are the reason billions get poured into R&D to develop new drugs. "Reforming" the system to do away with this would be a childish, self-loathing outburst: "If poor people can't have these remarkable new drugs, nobody can!"
There is an entire continuous spectrum of advertising -- from that which addresses genuine needs, to that which hawks frivolous junk. But ultranova made absolutely no distinctions and lumped all advertisers together as "parasites." OVER. THE. TOP.
I wish there was a User ID with which I could associate the credit for this fine, thoughtful post.
But the post can be improved...
It delievers your dry-cleaned clothes to your home. After you've unloaded it, it starts to head out of your cul-de-sac, knowing that it will soon be electronically summoned to perform some other mission. Sure enough, before it has even reached the end of your driveway, it's summoned to a nearby pizzeria, where it will be used to make a delivery.
Because these things are completely "fungible," as you say, the unit that delievered your clothes did not have to first be sent to the dry cleaner by you.
Because they are smaller than passenger cars, the boxen-on-wheels might be thought of as little nuisances by human drivers. To make themselves more visible, they could join themselves together into little trains, say, five units long. They would also gain a slight aerodynamic advantage in this configuration.
Once upon a time, air travel cost a lot more than rail travel. Some people flew anyway, because they perceived that faster is better. (Neither air passengers nor rail passengers are responsible for driving.)
Less time spent cooped up in a vehicle is a genuine advantage. Having said that, the premium people are willing to pay for that advantage will vary wildly from one individual to the next. Therefore, for some individuals, your fuel economy argument will win. (In theory. In practice, the present paradigm also allows people to creep along a highway at 35 mph in order to save fuel; but they never do.)
No matter who or what is driving, there's always a tradeoff between safety and speed. There's no reason to believe the compromise that is made for human drivers is also ideal for driving algorithms. In other words, if (at 55 mph) a driving algorithm proves to be two orders of magitude less accident-prone than human drivers, we may not want to raise the algorithm's speed limit until it becomes just as dangerous as a human driver. By raising its speed limit somewhat less than that, we'd get gains in both safety and speed.
Slashdot Mirror
Its lucky that the job market is infinitely flexible and everyone can pick and choose exactly what job they do, when they do it and how much they get paid for it.
Your sarcasm would be funny if it weren't so one-sided. Here are both sides of the matter:
People can't choose exactly what job they do and how much they get paid for it. (If they could, they would choose infinite compensation for doing nothing.)
Conversely, employers can't choose exactly who they want to hire and how much they want to pay in wages. (If they could, the would hire only the most qualified people in the world, and pay them nothing.)
The free market is the mechanism that finds the best compromise between these two extremes; it forges labor-for-money transactions that both parties perceive as being in their own best interests. If either employees or employers are coerced to alter their behavior, it's no longer a free market, and the transaction may no longer be in the best interest of one or both of the parties.
For example: Mary, a 67-yr-old woman on a fixed income, is willing to pay the neighbor kid $5 per hour to mow her lawn, and the neighbor kid is eager to put down his X-box controller and do it. But then Mary becomes aware that this would violate minimum wage laws, and decides not to proceed. Both parties have been precluded from a transaction that would have been in their own best interests.
Their big problem is the energy source. Internal combustion engines are just so 20th century.
Actually, they would have a big problem -- namely, abysmal energy density -- if they switched from internal combustion to batteries. The technology that best meets the mission requirements is the technology that should be used. Let's not have prejudices against the best-performing technology, simply because it also performed well in the 20th century.
Six weeks ago, Forbes published a piece that was entirely too flattering of DPR Ulbricht: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/meet-the-dread-pirate-roberts-the-man-behind-booming-black-market-drug-website-silk-road/
Found this tidbit here: when developing OS X v10.3, the "BSD layer was synchronized with FreeBSD 5".
Will new FreeBSD features eventually show up in Darwin/OS X, or have the two projects been sufficiently forked to prevent that from happening?
Excellent post. The broken window fallacy is truly a fallacy.
In this case, $561,000 of electricity per day works out to a whopping $205 million per year!
there will not be enough Bitcoins to cover the increased commerce
Sure there will, unless somebody tries to impose price controls that prevent Bitcoins from gaining value (i.e., that prevent deflation from happening). Deflation is the natural and proper response when the supply of a particular currency doesn't grow enough to meet the demand for that particular currency.
And if some entrepreneur introduces yet another currency, whose supply is more responsive to demand, that too is a natural and proper response.
Is the difficulty of minting new Bitcoins set in stone? Maybe it could be relaxed a bit, to try to prevent deflation.
Slightly off-topic: the goal of the Federal Reserve -- the target of its policies -- is for the U.S. dollar to experience inflation of 2% per year. Not 4%, not 0%, but 2%. Can anyone explain why? I've always thought a target of 0% would make more sense. The 2% target means that sellers have to expend effort to reprice their goods and services more often -- for no other reason than the existence of that 2% target. And that's not a productive activity. (And then there's old-timers who kvetch about the dollar not buying as much as it used to, and see inflation as a symptom of decay. They would have less to complain about, and have improved confidence in the economy, and feel like they were passing a more stable world on to their grandkids, if the Fed had a 0% target.)
If you anticipate inflation, it's in your interest to trade your currency for something that's less likely to lose value. Hyperinflation meets my definition of "collapse" of a currency.
If you anticipate deflation, it's in your interest to convert goods into currency that's likely to gain value (i.e., to hoard currency). A currency that's gaining value can hardly be said to have collapsed.
Deflation happens when the supply of a particular currency doesn't grow fast enough to meet the demand for that currency.
No disrespect, but how did your post get +5 Insightful?
"Contemptible-ness" should be, and is, proportional to two variables: how much the thief stole, and how much damage was done in the process.
Nevertheless, it's understandable if you shake your head when you hear that the victim's losses were £1,001, while the thief's gain was only £1.
Then he isn't very intelligent, is he?
Actually, researchers who use genetic algorithms to solve problems are extremely intelligent. "A genetic algorithm is a search heuristic that mimics the process of natural selection."
Natural selection itself, then, is the ultimate genetic algorithm, and the entity that created the process of natural selection is the ultimate intelligence.
I am honestly thrilled it works at your company :)
Go back to my original post: I was working for the federal government, and they were sending out annual emails asking for suggestions on how to spend the "underspend." Things weren't working there. That's dysfunctional.
I'm interested as to how your department is able to underspend four years in a row. Did they get any change to their budget after underspending the first year
My unit got annual increases, because by the end of the year, they managed to spend what had been shaping up to be an underspend. All the underspends were, frankly, wasted on crap we didn't need. That too is dysfunctional.
Speaking of Walmart, I can use it to make an example of what I'm talking about. The person controlling a store's finances should be rewarded when expenses are reduced. One way to do that is to find brands of janitorial supplies that work nearly as well as top-of-the-line brands, at half the cost. (Walmart's own "Great Value" store brand might fit the bill.) But if costs are cut to an unreasonable degree, the floors will be filthy. So the store should be judged on cleanliness, as well as expense levels. If done right, this will drive store management to find the sweet spot in the trade-off between low expenses and spotless floors.
Corporatists support corporations in general, without picking favorites. You got close by saying this is more cronyism than corporatism. To hit the nail on the head: this is ALL cronyism.
Those who banned Tesla are not -- by definition -- corporatists, because Tesla Motors is a corporation.
Those who banned Tesla are simply idiots. Replacing them with corporatists would be a big step up.
The companies who hold the large-battery patents are only shooting themselves in the foot if their asking price to license their intellectual property is so high that it stifles adoption.
Generally, owners of intellectual property do not shoot themselves in the foot. They prefer the large revenue stream that accompanies widespread adoption of their IP.
Mountain KitKat
You still don't seem to see my point, which is, it shouldn't be too difficult to set up a regulatory environment that rewards departments that don't spend their entire budget, and at the same time, punishes departments that use fraudulent means to try to obtain that reward. ("Fraudulent means" would include curtailing spending that is necessary to accomplish the mission.)
Why should my situation be considered an "unusual"? It happened four out of four years that I was employed there. When departments know that next year's budget will be cut if they don't go out of their way to spend 100% of this year's budget, wasteful spending is the usual and predictable result.
Our unit had already spent all the money it needed to, for those fiscal years, to accomplish its mission. Only then did our financial controller send emails asking for suggestions on how to spend the "underspend."
Cutting corners on accomplishing the mission is certainly not something that should be rewarded, and that's obviously not what I was talking about, unless you assume malicious intent on my part.
By the way, we ended up with "underspends" despite the fact that we weren't trying particularly hard to economize. We should have been. That wasn't our money we were spending; it was money withheld from the paychecks of people who earned it.
Last financial year, we had an underspend at work, and it was suggested...
Let me guess: this person works for the federal government.
Bureaucratic idiocies are real. When I worked for the federal government, our unit's financial controller sent out an annual email soliciting ideas for how to spend the underspend.
"Sent it back to Washington, so the Treasury can borrow marginally less money from China et.al." was never an option, because doing so would cause the unit's budget in the next fiscal year to be cut.
A better strategy, that might actually result in sub-trillion-dollar deficits, would be to reward government entities that don't spend their entire budget. Tell the financial controllers to send 99% of the "underspend" back to Washington, and personally pocket the other 1%. Suddenly you will see massive underspends appearing all over the place!
Yes, modeling the effect of speed limits on the economy would be a terribly complex problem. But probably not as complex as modeling global climate, and lots of people are enthusiastically tackling that problem. Any sort of reasonably-informed model would be better than what we have now: speed limits that are chosen somewhat arbitrarily, if not on "gut feelings."
there is no logical reason for a machine driven car to have a lower fatality rate than a human driven car.
The opposite can also be asserted, with at least as much validity: there's no logical reason why a driving algorithm, which is a very different animal than a human driver, should be equally unsafe as a human driver.
You know how a barber sometimes nicks your ears with his clippers or scissors? Suppose a robot barber is invented, and its astute sensors and precision control make nicks a thing of the past. Would ColdSam be out there saying, "speed the thing up until it nicks my ears just as often as my old barber did! Any other course of action would be illogical."
Reducing fatalities has an economic cost, and a logical, non-emotional society would specify exactly how much cost is acceptable to reduce fatalities. You have to draw the line somewhere (for example: "proposed guardrail installation is projected to prevent one fatality during its service life. We will proceed with installation if a contractor bid comes in under $9.8 million, but not if all bids are over $9.8 million.")
You need to apply a similar logic-based analysis at all points along a driving algorithm's speed/safety curve: "Regarding Google Driving Algorithm 4.2.3: reducing its speed limit from 137.338 mph to 137.311 mph is projected to prevent one fatality. We will proceed with this reduction only if it will shrink GDP by less than $9.8 million." Keep iterating until the marginal cost of a speed limit reduction is more than than the marginal benefit, and then stop, because right there you've found your optimal speed limit. (This is an oversimplification, of course, because there is no single speed limit applicable at all points on all roads.)
And guess what: when you use this logical process to find the optimal speed limit for Google Driving Algorithm 4.2.3, the fatality rate is not going to be the same as it was for human drivers. It's likely to be significantly lower than the fatality rate that was tolerated when humans were behind the wheel.
Kind of how like new drugs are very expensive at first, then cheap generics come out when the patent expires.
I wouldn't have it any other way. The profits made possible by patent protection are the reason billions get poured into R&D to develop new drugs. "Reforming" the system to do away with this would be a childish, self-loathing outburst: "If poor people can't have these remarkable new drugs, nobody can!"
There is an entire continuous spectrum of advertising -- from that which addresses genuine needs, to that which hawks frivolous junk. But ultranova made absolutely no distinctions and lumped all advertisers together as "parasites." OVER. THE. TOP.
Nobody will remove a package addressed to someone else, because they know their actions are being recorded and they would be swiftly prosecuted.
I wish there was a User ID with which I could associate the credit for this fine, thoughtful post.
But the post can be improved...
It delievers your dry-cleaned clothes to your home. After you've unloaded it, it starts to head out of your cul-de-sac, knowing that it will soon be electronically summoned to perform some other mission. Sure enough, before it has even reached the end of your driveway, it's summoned to a nearby pizzeria, where it will be used to make a delivery.
Because these things are completely "fungible," as you say, the unit that delievered your clothes did not have to first be sent to the dry cleaner by you.
Because they are smaller than passenger cars, the boxen-on-wheels might be thought of as little nuisances by human drivers. To make themselves more visible, they could join themselves together into little trains, say, five units long. They would also gain a slight aerodynamic advantage in this configuration.
Once upon a time, air travel cost a lot more than rail travel. Some people flew anyway, because they perceived that faster is better. (Neither air passengers nor rail passengers are responsible for driving.)
Less time spent cooped up in a vehicle is a genuine advantage. Having said that, the premium people are willing to pay for that advantage will vary wildly from one individual to the next. Therefore, for some individuals, your fuel economy argument will win. (In theory. In practice, the present paradigm also allows people to creep along a highway at 35 mph in order to save fuel; but they never do.)
No matter who or what is driving, there's always a tradeoff between safety and speed. There's no reason to believe the compromise that is made for human drivers is also ideal for driving algorithms. In other words, if (at 55 mph) a driving algorithm proves to be two orders of magitude less accident-prone than human drivers, we may not want to raise the algorithm's speed limit until it becomes just as dangerous as a human driver. By raising its speed limit somewhat less than that, we'd get gains in both safety and speed.